In today's competitive marketplace, it takes more than just creative talent to get ahead. What is it that sets the top designers apart from the pack? It's the ability to optimize time and efficiency. This article focuses on ways you can take advantage of Photoshop and set up your own customized workspaces.

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A big selling point for many web sites over the past few years (be it a
consumer site or a corporate intranet site) has been personalization
capabilities. Companies try to enhance the end user's experience by making
it feel as if there is a personal connection between you, the user, and the
information on the site. I don't just mean the fact that you get that cute
little greeting that says "Welcome back, Mr. Chominsky." I'm
talking about taking advantage of the power to have the content and information
that is specifically relevant to you... what you want to see. If I can
log onto a site and have all the information and resources that I'm looking
for appear in front of me quickly and easily, that saves me a great deal of time
and allows me to move ahead efficiently with what I need to get accomplished.

Fortunately, software developers understand the power of personalization. No,
not with the stupid greetingsbut by offering the user the power of
customization and optimization within the application. These days, no matter
what industry you're in, there never seems to be enough time to "work
at your own pace." Deadlines loom over our heads constantly. This time
constraint is especially true for graphic designers, and it's hard to be in
a creative mindset when working under the pressures of a due date. Well, Adobe
engineers have taken your precious time into consideration and now allow you to
set up and customize your working environment to be able to work more
efficiently.

Making Workspaces Work for You

Adobe Photoshop (like most of the other members of the Adobe family of
products) enables you to set up and save your own custom work areas, known as
workspaces, onscreen. Photoshop allows you to create and save as many
different workspaces as you need. Keep in mind that just because you can create
a virtually unlimited number of workspaces, there probably isn't a need to
have more than five or six. Anything more, and you're probably wasting time
trying to switch between your workspace templates (and not concentrating on your
creative efforts). The concept of customizing workspaces is to allow you to work
at your comfort level, maximize time and efficiency, and avoid clutter by having
the right resources available when you want them.

Like many beginners, you might start out by asking me "How should I set
up my palettes?" The simple answer is "I don't know. There is no
right way." I'm not giving you a copout answer; I really have no idea
what type of work you'll be doing. You should start off with the default
settings and alter them as you see fit. After you start working, you'll
realize which features and palettes you use most often. If you find yourself
constantly needing and opening a particular window, you may want to consider
having that one available as one of the "main" palettes in your
workspace.

Taking the concept one step further, customizing workspaces becomes extremely
handy when you start realizing that certain groupings of palettes work best when
performing specific tasks. For instance, when I'm working on masking an
image, there are certain tools and palettes I keep open for performing that
function. These are the tools and resources that are related to performing image
masking. Therefore, I have a workspace saved called "masking." With
two clicks of the mouse, I can recall all the palettes I need with the ideal
settings that I typically use for masking images. When I'm working on
color-correcting images, I usually need a totally different set of palettes and
resource (different from the ones I use for image masking). Same concept... with
two clicks of the mouse, I can bring up my color-correcting palettes exactly in
the place where I like them. (I bet you can't guess what I've named
this workspace.)